Telstra’s new $99 Android phone reaches new levels of budget goodness

Manufactured by ZTE, the new Telstra Smart-Touch isn’t likely to impress you with design or specs, but it sure packs in a fair punch for under a hundred dollars. We’re told it comes with a 2.8-inch touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel camera, WiFi, GPS, and Android 2.1.

You can probably expect that for $99, this phone won’t perform like an iPhone or top-of-the-line Android handset like the Nexus S. Proving that, the Smart-Touch lacks a multitouch screen and uses Android 2.1, a version of Google’s phone operating system that doesn’t support Flash natively.

Whether or not the Smart-Touch will get an upgrade to Android 2.2 or 2.3 isn’t yet known, but at $99, we can safely say that this handset represents a very inexpensive price point for new mobile phone customers.